Patriarchy and Male Headship

Patriarchy and Male Headship is the principle that places religious and domestic authority in men, especially male prophets and husbands. In the book, it is more than a statement about family roles: it shapes who may speak for God, who may direct a household, and who may claim authority over wives and children. Its consequences become especially visible in the fundamentalist communities, where religious commands reach into ordinary decisions and family ties can be treated as subject to priestly control.

Religious authority and male headship

The book presents a patriarchal structure across both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, while distinguishing the latter’s more extreme enforcement of obedience and gender roles. Men alone are admitted to the priesthood and to ecclesiastical positions, including the prophet’s office. Prophets, in turn, are treated as the authorized recipients of revelations that direct the faithful’s conduct. The principle joins family authority to institutional authority: the husband is established as household head within a religious order whose highest offices are also male.

This arrangement sits in tension with the early emphasis of Joseph Smith on personal revelation. He initially encouraged members to seek impressions from God for guidance in their lives. The possibility that different people might receive contradictory revelations, however, threatened the prophet’s exclusive authority. In 1830, the same year the church was incorporated, Joseph Smith declared that no one else should be appointed to receive commandments and revelations for the church. Members continued to seek personal guidance, and the continuing competition between individual revelation and prophetic control helped produce schisms. Male headship thus belongs to a wider struggle over who may define religious truth, not merely to a set of household customs.

Prophetic power in community life

In the United Effort Plan community under Rulon Jeffs, prophetic authority was described as carrying the weight of law. His sermons stressed total submission and obedience; the book also notes that he drew on nineteenth-century teachings by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Authority reached beyond worship and marriage into the regulation of daily life. Television, magazines, and newspapers were forbidden, as was contact with people outside the community, including relatives who had left. DeLoy Bateman described members secretly acquiring satellite dishes and then discarding them after sermons warned of the spiritual danger of television. The cycle shows how a rule could be reinforced through the expectation that leaders knew who was disobeying, as well as through formal prohibition.

Male rule also determined who could remain a family member and on what terms. Under United Effort Plan doctrine, wives and children were not considered the husband’s or parents’ property; they were treated as belonging to the priesthood and could be reassigned. When DeLoy Bateman stopped attending weekly priesthood meetings, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children and decreed that they should be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave, a decision the book describes as extraordinary within the community. Their choice, and the departure from the faith of most of DeLoy’s children, exposed a conflict between the prophet’s claimed authority and the family’s own attachments.

Marriage, kinship, and women's assigned roles

The book describes women in Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints communities as expected to serve their husbands, have as many children as possible, and raise them to obey the religion. The community’s teaching about gender was reinforced through rules for clothing, courtship, and sexual conduct. This model made women’s obligations explicit while concentrating decision-making authority in men and male religious leaders.

Marriage arrangements show how prophetic authority could organize intimate and extended kinship alike. When Debbie Palmer was fourteen, she believed she had received an impression from God to marry community leader Ray Blackmore. She asked her father to convey it to LeRoy Johnson, who approved the match; a year later, at fifteen, Debbie was married to Blackmore, then fifty-seven, as his sixth wife. She became stepmother to his thirty-one children, most of them older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of her stepmother, the marriage made Debbie her stepmother’s stepmother. These relationships are not incidental complications: they demonstrate how a prophet’s approval and a man’s household could reorder family positions around women’s marriages.

Alaire Blackmore’s history further illustrates the community’s shifting assignments of family status. Adopted by Ray Blackmore, she was married to him at eighteen, making her both Debbie Palmer’s stepdaughter and cowife. After Ray died, she was married to Debbie’s father; when Winston Blackmore took power, she was transferred from that household and married to Winston, her adoptive brother. The sequence shows women’s marriages and kinship positions being rearranged as male authority changed hands.

Household rules and the case of Dan and Matilda Lafferty

The ideas in The Peace Maker provided a particularly forceful household application of male headship for Dan Lafferty. Dan studied the treatise and came to believe that Joseph Smith had written it, although he acknowledged that he could not be certain. He then imposed its strictures on Matilda Lafferty and their family. Matilda was no longer permitted to drive, handle money, or speak to people outside the family when Dan was absent, and she was required to wear a dress. The children were removed from school and forbidden to play with friends. Dan also rejected outside medical care, relying instead on prayer, fasting, and herbal remedies; when their fifth child was born in July 1983, he delivered the baby at home.

Control extended to the family’s material routines. They grew much of their own food and scavenged other provisions; Dan turned off the gas and electricity and prohibited publications other than Latter-day Saint books and magazines. He removed the household’s watches and clocks, believing time should be kept by the spirit. When Matilda disobeyed, he punished her and warned that she could be expelled from the marriage without her children, whom the doctrine treated as the father’s property. He also announced an intention to take another wife and proposed Matilda’s oldest daughter, his stepdaughter, as the first. Matilda later described her choice as remaining with Dan or leaving her children; she stayed. Her decision makes clear how the principle operated not only through a husband’s rules but through the threatened loss of family itself.

Significance and limits of the principle

The book’s examples show male headship working through overlapping kinds of power: priesthood authority, prophetic approval of marriage, a husband’s control of household resources, and the claimed right to determine children’s placement. In the United Effort Plan community, the state’s legal recognition of plural marriage did not match the community’s religious arrangements: typically, only the first wife was legally married, while subsequent wives were considered spiritually married and remained single mothers in the eyes of the state. The contrast reveals two competing systems for defining marriage and family status.

The principle is presented as a structure that can make obedience appear both sacred and ordinary. A prophet’s direction may govern marriage; a husband’s command may govern clothing, work, education, or access to outsiders. Yet the book also records limits and refusals: Matilda remained despite the constraints on her choices, and DeLoy Bateman’s wives rejected the order to leave him. These moments do not dissolve the hierarchy, but they make visible the personal relationships and decisions it seeks to subordinate. Patriarchy and Male Headship therefore names both an organizing doctrine and a practical distribution of power, one whose authority is most evident when family members resist its claim to decide for them.